The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (59 page)

It was Vasco da Gama who fired the starting gun on the long, fraught centuries of Western imperialism in Asia, and it was the success of the global Crusade known as the Age of Discovery that allowed the Christian West to dismiss its old rivalry with Islam as a relic of darker times. Yet that rivalry remained a powerful undercurrent of history even as Christians fought Christians, Muslims fought Muslims, and—occasionally—both joined forces to fight a common enemy. To Islamists who dream of a reborn caliphate ruling a restored empire it is unfinished business, and the world order founded in the wake of colonialism—including the United Nations and the very concept of democracy—is an ongoing Western plot to impose an alien way of life, the Crusades in a subtler guise. Meanwhile a new era begins in which China and India retake their traditional places as the engines of the world’s economy—and yet just when we should be competing for global markets and minds, we find ourselves drawn back into the old religious conflict.

It is easy to be fatalistic. Christians and Muslims, it can seem, barricaded themselves into hostile camps so long ago that nothing can be done. No one has a monopoly on right and everyone has an interest in understanding, yet our mutual distrust is too deep-seated to dislodge. Cooperation sometimes thrives, but holy wars never end.

There is another way—a way shown by the many men and women who instinctively rejected the division of the globe into rival religious blocs. There were the Muslims of Córdoba and
Baghdad, the alchemists of wild explosions of cultural interaction. There were the Christians of Toledo and Sicily, who carried on that progressive tradition. There was Frederick II, who sat down with a sultan and negotiated a lease on Jerusalem. There was Mehmet the Conqueror, the cultivated tyrant who turned Istanbul into an international melting pot. There was Leonardo da Vinci, who sought enlightened patrons wherever his mind took him. There were even the kings and queens of France and England and their allies, the Ottoman sultans. Like the early Crusaders, there were also countless Europeans who were captivated by the ancient cultures of Asia and went native, to the horror of their compatriots back home.

The clash between East and West has consistently been as creative as it has been destructive. The one thing it has never been is stilled, and dogmatists and diehards of all stripes have soon enough found themselves left behind. Among those were the pathfinders, the Portuguese themselves. In the end, the religious certainty that drove Vasco da Gama and his fellow explorers halfway around the world was also their undoing. For all their astonishing achievements, the idea of a Last Crusade—a holy war to end all holy wars—was always a crazy dream.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W
RITING THIS BOOK
has been an education and an adventure. During my research, I delved into the past in Lisbon and Rome, sailed the Swahili Coast in search of ruined cities, and was buffeted by the monsoon in Kerala and Goa. As I journeyed from Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Morocco to Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, and India, I was privileged to enjoy the unstinting advice, help, and friendship of numerous people. Most were previously strangers, like Karisa Keah, who went especially out of his way to steer me through the remote backwaters of East African history. My obligations to all are too many to mention, but their conversation and companionship are unfading memories.

A book of this scope would have been impossible to conceive without the scholarly work of generations of historians. In particular, the translators and editors of the Hakluyt Society’s editions of rare travel accounts have made an invaluable trove of primary sources available in English. My great debts to other scholars past and present are recorded in the notes. The congenial atmosphere and ever-helpful staff of the London Library made the process of tracking down elusive material a pleasure. My thanks, too, to the librarians and curators of the British Library and National Maritime Museum in London, the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, and Sociedade de Geografia in Lisbon, the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, the Heidelberg University Library, the library of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Massimiliano Durante and Francisco Vilhena patiently helped me to unravel the knottier clauses of medieval Italian and Portuguese. Angelica von Hase read the manuscript and made many cogent suggestions. Julia Kaltschmidt was always ready with advice during the long and sometimes winding journey that brought me to this subject.

In the United States, my agent, Henry Dunow, has been the best possible friend to a writer feeling his way into his second book, and a guru when sage advice was needed. My sincere thanks to Terry Karten, my editor at Harper, for her ready support and advocacy. Thanks, too, to Harper’s David Koral, Sarah Odell, Bill Ruoto, and copy editor Tom Pitoniak, and also to Nancy Miller. In the UK, many thanks to Ravi Mirchandani, my editor, and to Elizabeth Sheinkman, who represented the book.

While working on this book I met and married my wife. Wedding planning wreaks havoc with deadlines, and splendors of the heart sit strangely with often dark and invariably male material. I could wish the subject at hand was more romantic, but the dedication is for life, not for now.

NOTES

Prologue

1
The light was fading:
For my sources for Vasco da Gama’s first voyage, see the notes to chapter 7.

4
Spanish and Italian:
Specifically, the Tunisian merchants spoke Castilian and Genoese; the former evolved into modern Spanish, while the latter is still spoken in the Genoa region today.

6
the medieval and the modern ages:
Historians have offered a variety of dates for the end of the Middle Ages; two leading contenders are 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, and 1492, the year of Columbus’s first voyage. If the overriding theme of the medieval age is Europe’s decline and the rise of Islam, the dominant theme of the modern age is the Christian West’s global surge to power. From that perspective, it makes little sense to start the latter with the fall of the final bastion of the classical world to the Ottomans. Columbus did not reach the mainland of the Americas until August 1498, and it was decades before the impact of his discoveries became clear. Vasco da Gama arrived in India in May 1498, and it was his achievement, I argue, that allowed Europe to believe the historical tide had finally turned.

Chapter 1: East and West

12
god of the Jews:
Jews traced their ancestry to Isaac, Abraham’s son by his wife Sarah; Muslims to Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Sarah’s Egyptian slave girl Hagar. Arab tradition holds that Abraham
restored the Kaaba, which was founded by Adam and rebuilt by Noah, while he was visiting Hagar and Ishmael, whom his jealous wife had forced him to send into exile.

13
“dark-eyed houris”:
N. J. Dawood, trans.,
The Koran: With a Parallel Arabic Text
(London: Penguin, 2000), 497.

14
Church of the Holy Sepulcher:
The site was uncovered by Constantine’s mother Helena, who set out in 325 on a relic-hunting trip to the Holy Land and miraculously unearthed parts of the True Cross on which Jesus was believed to have died, the nails that pierced his hands and feet, and, according to some accounts, the Holy Tunic and the rope with which he was tied to the cross. Some of the finds accompanied her home, including two of the nails, one of which ended up in Constantine’s helmet and the other on his bridle; others stayed to be housed in the new church. Since tradition held that Jesus was crucified over the exact spot where Adam’s skull was buried, the church was also believed to enclose the tomb of the first man. See Colin Morris,
The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

14
a blackened sky:
The Persians sacked Jerusalem in 614 CE. In 70 CE the Romans had put down a mass Jewish uprising by burning down the Second Temple, razing the city, and massacring or carting away the entire population; never since had Jews been permitted to live in the city of David. The Jews allied with the Persians to wreak 544 years of revenge, only to be massacred again when the Romans marched back in; they would soon ally more successfully with the Arabs.

15
churning Christian controversy:
The main bone of contention was the precise degree of Christ’s divinity. The orthodox position, hammered out at a series of great councils, was that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human, two distinct states united in one perfect being. Many of the empire’s subjects begged to differ. Arians denied Jesus’s divinity, Monophysites denied his humanity, Nestorians declared he was two beings, one divine and one human, and other groups fixed on a variety of intermediate states. Successive emperors decreed that a united empire required a unified faith and charged the dissenters with heresy. Heraclius, the victor over Persia, had reopened the fraught question in search of a compromise, but the resulting creed of Monothelitism, which declared that Jesus had
two natures but only one will, satisfied no one and was rejected as heretical within five decades.

15
a new regime:
Centuries later, leaders of the independent Eastern churches that survived under Islam still saw the Arabs as saviors. “The God of vengeance,” wrote a twelfth-century patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church, “having observed the malice of the Greeks, who cruelly pillaged our churches and monasteries wherever they had dominion and condemned us mercilessly, brought the sons of Ishmael from the south to deliver us.” Michael the Syrian, quoted in Stephen O’Shea,
Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World
(London: Profile, 2006), 52.

15
“Damn this world”:
The quotation is from the great epic poem
Shahnameh
, or
Book of Kings
, by Ferdowsi, which was written at the turn of the first millennium CE. The best translation is by Dick Davis (New York: Viking, 2006). The Persian aristocracy, though it quickly adopted Islam, long nursed an animosity to Arab culture and an attachment to the splendors of pre-Islamic Persia.

15
Jerusalem was starved into submission:
The city fell in April 637. According to tradition, Muhammad’s successor Umar arrived dressed in rags and rode through the Gate of Repentance astride a white ass (or camel). He asked the patriarch where King David had prayed and was led to the Temple Mount, which he found had long been used as a rubbish dump. Umar rounded up some Christians and put them to work clearing the refuse, then erected a simple wooden house of worship that would later be replaced by the al-Aqsa Mosque (see chapter 2).

16
Saracens:
The term
sarakenoi
or
saraceni
originally referred to the non-Arab peoples of northern Arabia, but it was subsequently applied to Arabs and then to all Muslims. Its etymology is unclear, but by the fourth century the historian Ammianus Marcellinus noted that it was used to refer to the region’s desert nomads.

16
commanded from on high:
So feared the Armenian bishop Sebeos; see Alfred J. Butler,
The Arab Conquest of Egypt
—
and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1902), 152. Of the five great patriarchates of the Church, three—Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria—now operated under the sufferance of Islamic rulers.

16
stabbed with a poisoned sword:
Ali’s assassin was fanatically certain that piety, not genealogy, should be the sole qualification for Islam’s leader. His simple, puritanical version of Islam would become known as Kharijism and would take root most firmly in North Africa. Pockets survive today in Arabia and Africa.

16
the Umayyads:
Muawiya, the founder of the dynasty, was the son of Abu Sufyan Ibn Harb, a prominent Meccan who led the attack on Medina that nearly annihilated Islam. At the end of the same battle Muawiya’s mother, Hind, ripped out and dined on the liver of Muhammad’s uncle Hamza. The civil war also left Muhammad’s grandson murdered and the Kaaba itself in flames; pragmatic power politics had dramatically won out over pious purity.